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Today:
Europe Is Answering Putin’s Challenge
NEWS | 18 October 2025
And in response to Russia’s harassment, NATO established a more enhanced and coordinated defense of its eastern flank, including counter-drone measures, called Eastern Sentry. Of course, Trump has still not reversed his long-held antipathy toward a U.S.-led alliance that has helped secure peace in Europe for nearly eight decades. “At best, there is a frosty peace in Europe, which could turn into hot confrontation here and there at any moment. With little effort, he has exposed seams in air defenses, and Russian military planners will now better understand NATO responses. Listen: Europe, the ‘Sleeping Beauty’It’s not clear if the Trump administration supports using the Russian funds.

Top Stories:
The Cleaner Way to Get Ripped
NEWS | 18 October 2025
Body-composition researchers have established that a surplus of calories, plus resistance training, is required to gain muscle. But spending months “dirty” bulking, as the ice-cream-and-burgers method is sometimes called, can also generate huge amounts of fat. The concept of clean bulking emerged in the past decade or so, but it took off only recently, he said. That not only obscures your gains but can hinder their growth: Working off fat sacrifices some lean muscle, Escalante said. Around 2021, Big Dru switched to clean bulking because his previous diet gave him digestive issues, headaches, hormonal imbalances, and heartburn.

World:
American Infrastructure Is About to Get Even Worse
NEWS | 18 October 2025
Forty years ago, the New York City parks department was struggling to rebuild Central Park’s decrepit Wollman ice-skating rink. He should get a ticker-tape parade.”Now New York City is again trying to get something done, and this time, Trump is the obstacle. All of the major federal transportation projects being pursued in red and blue states alike have taken pains to comply. The Trump administration seems to be claiming the right to shut down every federally subsidized transportation project across the country. (On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that the Gateway project had been “terminated.”)America pays orders of magnitude more for infrastructure projects than other wealthy countries do.

Current Events:
What Won’t Congress Let Trump Get Away With?
NEWS | 18 October 2025
This is what the United States did to men like Ayman al-Zawahiri. As my colleague Nick Miroff recently wrote, fentanyl isn’t reaching America via drug boats in the Caribbean, which mostly traffic in cocaine and marijuana. And even most cocaine reaches America by land, via organizations based in Colombia and Mexico, rather than the Venezuelans the United States is now targeting. If he is fighting the drug war, he is doing so in the manner of a Latin American strongman, not a president. What won’t Congress let him get away with?

News Flash:
Photos of the Week: Cave Lights, Mountain Shepherd, Snowbirds Formation
NEWS | 18 October 2025
Dominika Zarzycka / SOPA Images / LightRocket / GettyBaca leads about 1,200 sheep in Nowy Targ, Podhale, in the Polish part of the Tatra Mountains, as the sheep-grazing season ends, on October 12, 2025. This ceremonial annual migration of the sheep is called redyk, celebrated as a festive time by highlanders from the Tatra Mountain region and the wider Carpathian area.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 18 October 2025
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

Latest:
It’s Not a Dog Whistle If Everyone Can Hear It
NEWS | 18 October 2025
Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign of racial grievance enabled him to shift the Court rightward with three new appointments. Trump himself has a long history of bigoted remarks, yet he has seized on bigoted comments by Black South Africans to justify inviting white South Africans to seek refuge in the United States. The ability to use offensive language without social sanction is a core appeal of the MAGA movement for some supporters. As The New York Times reports, this might include members of the far-right political party Alternative for Germany, or AfD. The new Tron sequel (out now in theaters) travels beyond cyberspace but won’t leave the sci-fi nonsense behind, David Sims writes.

Breaking:
Why Is Vance Defending That Racist Group Chat?
NEWS | 18 October 2025
This week, Politico revealed the contents of Young Republican leaders’ group chats, which were filled with rampant bigotry, endorsements of rape, and praise for a certain fascist dictator (“I love Hitler”). But Vice President J. D. Vance had a different, and more telling, response. Yet the rhetoric in the Republican chats is far more disturbing, in both its nature and its influence. That a group of ambitious professional Republicans can spread nakedly racist messages without rebuke signifies the transformation of conservative political norms in the Trump era. In the racist provocations of conservative cadres, Vance clearly sees the future of the party he intends to lead.

Trending:
Lost in AirPod Translation
NEWS | 18 October 2025
I speak some Spanish, but I wanted to test out Apple’s new “Live Translation” feature, which has been advertised as a sort of interpreter in your ears. (It corrected to cempasúchil, which means “marigolds.”)Apple did not respond to a request for comment on my experience with Live Translation. Oddly, Apple offers Live Translation in Portuguese but as spoken in Brazil—the world’s seventh-most-populated nation. When using the AirPods to translate Spanish, I appeared stiff and bumbling at best, terribly rude at worst. Live Translation, in aiming to fix all that messiness in an algorithm streamed through Bluetooth earbuds, is not opening human communication up so much as flattening it.

This Just In:
A Frightening American Fable
NEWS | 18 October 2025
Congress has been reduced to little more than a rubber stamp for the president and a trading floor for business transactions. He makes his way not to Washington but to Wall Street, to buy up distressed American assets. Written around the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s reelection that year, the story’s grim portrait of the American future offered bitter comment on the expansionist, corporate America of Sedgwick’s day. The president in question is President Schmidt, who rules without any challenge to his power in a one-party, Republican state. The effect is a fable of an America that’s lost its moorings, and a citizenry that convinces itself it’s still living under the same constitutional order, even as that order grows unrecognizable.

Today:
The Democratic Governor Who Drinks Raw Milk
NEWS | 18 October 2025
In 2015, Polis, then a Democratic congressman from Colorado, dined on hemp scones and washed them down with a glass of raw milk. In May, the health secretary, who has said he drinks only raw milk, downed a shot of the stuff during a podcast taping in the White House. Few prominent Democratic politicians want anything to do with RFK Jr. and his agenda to remake American health; Polis is the exception. And by not openly identifying with MAHA, Polis avoids alienating himself from Colorado’s Democratic voters. Read: RFK Jr. is repeating Michelle Obama’s mistakesThe GOP’s embrace of these food policies has put Democrats in an odd position.

Top Stories:
The Great Friendship Flattening
NEWS | 18 October 2025
And picking my loved ones out of the never-ending stream of stuff on my phone requires extra effort. But now social media is eating media-media’s lunch, nibbling into time that used to be spent watching TV and movies, particularly for younger generations, and refashioning itself less as a network and more as a broadcaster. Parasocial relationships, classically, are the sort of one-sided imagined relationships that people feel with celebrities or even fictional characters. Gayle Stever, a psychology professor at Empire State University who researches parasociality, told me that the distinction between social and parasocial relationships has long been fuzzy, and social media has made it even less clear. My best theory to sum all of this up is that a trickle-down effect is happening: As social media starts to look more like entertainment, private messaging starts to look more like social media.

World:
What Happens When Trump Gets His Way With Science
NEWS | 18 October 2025
Of Harvard’s schools, HSPH has been by far the most reliant on government grants—and so was the hardest hit by the Trump administration’s cuts to federal research funding. If the Trump administration’s aim has been to upend American science, HSPH is a prime example of what that looks like. But the school’s dean, too, has become something of an emblem—of how unprepared many scientists are to face this new political reality. Some nine months into the Trump administration’s assault on academic science, Harvard’s public-health school has just about everything going against it that an American academic institution can. About half of the school’s faculty contributes in some way to international research, which the administration has also taken a stand against.

Current Events:
The Conquest of Chicago
NEWS | 18 October 2025
It was as if he were describing a foreign occupation, but from the beginning, President Donald Trump has framed his Chicago operation as a military conquest. The village of Broadview, where the ICE building is located, has banned protests before 9 a.m. or after 6 p.m. In Chicago, city officials and neighborhood activist groups have been more disciplined, coordinating closely on efforts to slow ICE’s “Operation Midway Blitz.” Illinois Governor J. The incidents do not show protesters attacking officers, but DHS officials say assaults are soaring and gangs in Chicago have bounties on federal officials. The federal agents have been quick to draw their guns, and they have shot two people in Chicago already.

News Flash:
Feeling Desolate? There Is a Cure for That.
NEWS | 18 October 2025
This is how Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order of priests, described “spiritual desolation” in 1548. He was referring to the feeling of emptiness that people tend to feel after the initial euphoria of a religious conversion. Similarly, the happiest workers are those who endure by learning and applying positive coping strategies in the face of the problems that characterize job desolation. A time comes in the spiritual life, Ignatius asserts, when desolation cannot be denied or avoided. And when it comes to work, a change from time to time can be a very good and healthy thing.